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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/07/mainstream-politics-offer-pretend-revolutions-to-a-discontented-public/

Mainstream Politics Offer Pretend Revolutions To A Discontented Public

In 2008 the American public was fed up with the disastrous status quo politics of George W Bush, so they came together and elected a progressive candidate who campaigned on hope and change to replace him.

But no progress happened; the hope and change never came. Barack Obama continued and expanded all of his predecessor’s most depraved policies at home and abroad, and it wasn’t long before the initial elation wore off and the illusion that things were looking up evaporated. It was as if Bush had never left office.

Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.

But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.

In order to stop fascism, the American people had yet another people’s uprising against the corrupt status quo and… elected Obama’s vice president. Lifelong corporate crony and empire lackey Joe Biden now sits in the White House, advancing all the same murderous, oppressive, exploitative, authoritarian policies as his predecessors, as a result of the latest fake, decoy revolution against tyranny.

And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.

Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.

As Gore Vidal once said:

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”

That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied. It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.

From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire. Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression. You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire. The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare. Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire. A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.

The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel. The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, general strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions. There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws. Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.

What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/reset-yourself/

Reset Yourself !

If Quentin Tarantino made a James Bond movie, the villain would be a maniac named Klaus Schwab, played with a light touch by Christoph Waltz, leading a SMERSH-like org bent on turning the world into a utopia of robots, and, of course, absolutely everything would go wrong, leading to a joyously comical bloodbath in the climax. Are we living in that movie, one wonders?

In real life — is there even such a thing anymore? — Klaus Schwab is the octogenarian head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the NGO that hosts the annual cavalcade of global villains at Davos, Switzerland, held every January in perfect designer snow, with the raclette melting temptingly on the hearth, endless flutes of Bollinger R.D. Extra Brut making the rounds, and plenty of pretty young things on hand, only some of whom know a reverse repo from an Appenzeller Sennenhund. Must be fun as all git-out.

The Davos meeting is ostensibly called to improve the state of the world (ha!), and thereby inspires countless paranoid fever dreams in the minds of many who would prefer to be spared utopian social experiments, especially from plans drawn by billionaire bankers who view the present surfeit of mankind on this planet (some 7.6 billion) as cluttering up the joint — all these unnecessary hoi polloi filling the oceans with their yukky plastic, making navigation difficult for the Davos yachting crowd… or something like that.

Klaus Schwab has been shockingly literal about his wished-for utopia, summing up his vision as, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy about it.” Hmmm, no property… and then what? Logically, no corpus of contract law to regulate it?  Farewell pesky US constitution. (Let’s face it, it’s been falling apart lately, anyhow.) How’s that going to make folks happy? Can I at least keep my Waterpik and my flyrod?

And what about your property Klaus?  And the property of your nonagenarian buddy George Soros, including all the cash money he’s been sprinkling around the USA to fund the election of utterly incompetent Attorneys General and District Attorneys, so as to sow chaos in America’s streets? What about your pal Bill Gates’s property… those hundreds of thousands of acres he’s buying up across the American grain belt? And the half that goes to Melinda under California divorce law. Will the poor girl have to make those dreary trips to the Safeway on her own?  Will there even be supermarkets? Or just distribution depots like the old soviet glory days, with long lines for schmoozing?

A few other particulars from Klaus’s 2030 agenda: No more meat-eating for you! It’s a waste of energy and a carbon spewer. You will eat artificial “plant-based meat” from Bill Gates’s soybean fields, self-propagated like giant boneless garden slugs on Bill Gates’s factory walls. Pass the Sriracha, Klaus! Next, no more national borders. The teeming poor evacuating their wretched overpopulated homelands must be free to overpopulate your homeland and make it equally wretched. Of course, no more fossil fuels! The planet is overheating so badly that there may not be any snow in Davos, and the Davos elect do not intend to don lederhosen and march up and down the bare Jakobshorn ski trails yodeling like goat herders.

There is considerable unease among the sentient hoi polloi about the WEF exercise going forward this summer called the Cyber Polygon simulation. The idea is to game-out a cyber-attack aimed at bringing down the global financial system.  The reason folks are nervous is because the WEF held a somewhat similar simulation in October 2019 for a hypothetical pandemic disease outbreak, and, guess what? We got the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak a few months later. This has led some observers to hypothesize that Klaus and his WEF might have had something to do with the Covid-19 outbreak, and that an actual global financial train-wreck will be in the works shortly after Cyber Polygon, opening the door for Klaus’s heralded Great Reset.

Personally, I have no data to suggest these things are linked to one another. What’s more, if ever a complex system had evolved to self-destruct spectacularly on its own, it would be the global financial system, but especially the parts of it currently running in the USA and in Euroland, based on the Big Rock Candy Mountain economic model: Need money to run your society when your standard of living has outrun your productive capacity? Just pick hundred dollar bills off the money trees! That’s how we roll.

America’s empty suit, “Joe Biden,” travels to Euroland this week to confab with his supposed counterparts. He’ll drop into the G-7 meeting in Cornwall, UK, where the head honchos of foreign lands will perhaps get a chance to size him up for twenty minutes between naps; he’ll meet Queen Elizabeth, who was appointed a Counsellor of State before “Joe Biden” was out of his diapers (will she appreciate his wit?); he’ll drop into a NATO Summit in Brussels and meet with Turkey’s President Erdogan — better wear protective head-gear, Joe — and finally, the main event on June 16, Mr. Biden will meet with Vladimir Putin, wherewith, we’re given to believe, Mr. B will “discuss matters of mutual interest” with the Russian president. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that room!

Meanwhile, speaking of crashing financials, the Bank of International Settlements’ (BIS) Basel 3 net stable funding requirement goes into effect before the end of June. That’s a mouthful, I know, but the net effect will be the demise of the “paper” gold markets that have been used by interested parties to queer the gold price and thus protect the value of the dollar for decades. Combine that move with the — what? — $11-trillion that “Joe Biden’s” handlers seek to print-up and distribute the next year or so and it kind of looks like the US dollar should be given last rites. Prepare to reset yourselves to flat broke.